The publication U.S. Pat. No. 5,974,199 describes a method for scanning and detecting a plurality of photographs on a scanner. The method detects the number and skew angle of the photographs and removes edge artifacts. The method first conducts a low-resolution scan of the photographs on the scanner platen to produce an image of the plurality of photographs. The method then constructs a plurality of polygons, where each polygon contains at least one photograph. A number of polygons is then determined and compared to the number of photographs, the latter number being supplied by the user. If the number of constructed polygons is less than the number of photographs, the user is informed to re-position the photographs in order to separate overlapped photographs and the low resolution scan is repeated. The method then deters a skew angle and location for each one of the photographs from the determined polygons. The result of the photograph detection is displayed on a touch screen and the user selects a photograph of interest by touching the screen. The method then scans the selected photograph at high resolution to produce a high-resolution image. The high-resolution image is then de-skewed and cropped to remove the edge artifacts.
The method of U.S. Pat. No. 5,974,199 suffers from the disadvantage that it requires large memory requirements for processing the photographs. It also suffers from the disadvantage that it is a two pass process, in that it initially requires a low resolution scan of the photographs an finally a high resolution scan of the selected photograph.